Originally posted by: ViRGE
My question is that if this is true, what exactly is Valve doing that breaks multi-sampling FSAA. It's a perfectly valid form of FSAA, and by far and wide, most games work fine with it, so what is Valve doing all of a sudden that breaks this?
PS Ironically enough, if MSAA is the problem, then the GeForce 1/2 can run it just fine, they use SSAA
It's a problem for any app that packs small textures into larger textures. The small textures will bleed into each other if you have multisample FSAA enabled. The best thing to do right now is either buy an ATI card in the hopes that it will be solved there, or wait until the next generation of cards come out.
Originally posted by: ViRGE
Thanks NFS4. Here's a thought for Valve then: don't pack small textures in to big ones!.
Drivers aren't likely to fix the problem, with the exception of the ATI 9500-9800. There's hope there for being able to use FSAA properly. You are out of luck on NVidia unless either NVidia or us come up with some clever way of solving this problem.
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The problem is specifically with multisample antialiasing on any card that uses multisample antialiasing. If you use supersampling you should be fine. Actually, this problem has existed for any game that uses light maps that are packed into a subrect (like Quake 3, etc). You will be able to turn FSAA if you like (in the control panel for your video card), but it's likely to have artifacts on triangle boundaries. We don't recommend turning multisample antialiasing on for cards that don't have centroid sampling. . .your mileage may vary.
Originally posted by: Nebor
Again I say, who is Valve, a smalltime game production company, to tell Nvidia, the #1 graphics chipset and amd mobo chipset producer in the world, what they can and can't do. I think if a fix is possible, Nvidia could do it.
If not, I think it's up to Valve to make sure their game works on a variety of systems. They are obviously VERY full of themselves if they just EXPECT us to buy whatever kind of graphics cards they say we should have, just to run their single game. Every other game that comes out has figured out how to make FSAA work... why should valve be any different. That's like, if they said that Intel processors didn't correctly run the games physics engine.... Would Intel jump right on that? No, us consumers would expect Valve to make it work, not tell us to buy ATI cards.
I can tell you this, if I can't play HL2 on an Nvidia card, then I won't be buying HL2.
Actually, this problem has existed for any game that uses light maps that are packed into a subrect (like Quake 3, etc). You will be able to turn FSAA if you like (in the control panel for your video card), but it's likely to have artifacts on triangle boundaries. We don't recommend turning multisample antialiasing on for cards that don't have centroid sampling. . .your mileage may vary.
Originally posted by: Nebor
Again I say, who is Valve, a smalltime game production company, to tell Nvidia, the #1 graphics chipset and amd mobo chipset producer in the world, what they can and can't do. I think if a fix is possible, Nvidia could do it.
If not, I think it's up to Valve to make sure their game works on a variety of systems. They are obviously VERY full of themselves if they just EXPECT us to buy whatever kind of graphics cards they say we should have, just to run their single game. Every other game that comes out has figured out how to make FSAA work... why should valve be any different. That's like, if they said that Intel processors didn't correctly run the games physics engine.... Would Intel jump right on that? No, us consumers would expect Valve to make it work, not tell us to buy ATI cards.
I can tell you this, if I can't play HL2 on an Nvidia card, then I won't be buying HL2.
Originally posted by: Electrode
That whole article reeks of bullshit to me.
2) What are potential solutions?
Support Centroid Sampling
Use Pixel Shaders to Clamp Texture Coordinates
Centroid sampling doesn't have the problem that center sampling does in multi-sample antil-aliasing. ATI has supported this form of anti-aliasing for the 9000 series. The tricky part is enabling this when DirectX doesn't easily expose this.
There's a different trick you can use with hardware, such as NVIDIA's, that doesn't support centroid sampling. Basically you trade off some pixel shader bandwidth to clamp the texture coordinates so that you don't sample texels outside of that polygon's lightmap sub-rect.
Between these two approaches, multi-sample anti-aliasing artifacts should be a non-issue for any DX9-level hardware running Pixel Shader 2.0.
Originally posted by: nycdude
My system and video card is behind the times so none of those fancy features matter. Can't miss what you never had.
I could never afford to shell a great deal of $$ on a high end comp system and $250-$500 is way too much to spend on a video card, IMHO.
Besides, the mrs would nag me to death on it.
Originally posted by: Nebor
Again I say, who is Valve, a smalltime game production company, to tell Nvidia, the #1 graphics chipset and amd mobo chipset producer in the world, what they can and can't do. I think if a fix is possible, Nvidia could do it.
If not, I think it's up to Valve to make sure their game works on a variety of systems. They are obviously VERY full of themselves if they just EXPECT us to buy whatever kind of graphics cards they say we should have, just to run their single game. Every other game that comes out has figured out how to make FSAA work... why should valve be any different. That's like, if they said that Intel processors didn't correctly run the games physics engine.... Would Intel jump right on that? No, us consumers would expect Valve to make it work, not tell us to buy ATI cards.
I can tell you this, if I can't play HL2 on an Nvidia card, then I won't be buying HL2.
I am totally at a loss to understand why people treat their choice of video card as a decision of religious importance.